Arguably James’ best known novel, this is a tale of love, duty, wealth, and mores. The heroine, Isabel, is an American lady, who comes into a great fortune while visiting her aunt in England. “The pessimism of this young lady was transient; she ultimately made up her mind that to be rich was a virtue, because it was to be able to do, and to do was sweet. It was the contrary of weakness. To be weak was, for a young lady, rather graceful, but, after all, as Isabel said to herself, there was a larger grace than that.”
Isabel had her hands full of eligible suitors, but her love found its own path. “Her mind contained no class which offered a natural place to Mr. Osmond — he was a specimen apart. Isabel did not say all these things to herself at the time; but she felt them, and afterwards they became distinct. For the moment she only said to herself that Mr. Osmond had the interest of rareness. It was not so much what he said and did, but rather what he withheld, that distinguished him; he indulged in no striking deflections from common usage; he was an original without being an eccentric.” For his part, Gilbert Osmond might not have been in love, but he was intrigued from the start. “Osmond was in his element; at last he had material to work with. He always had an eye to effect; and his effects were elaborately studied. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great.” James’ cutting description of the man continues, “Under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values, Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master, as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success…. Everything he did was pose…. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world’s curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.”
The marriage of Isabel and Gilbert was not a success. “It was as if Osmond deliberately, almost malignantly, had put the lights out one by one…. She knew of no wrong that he had done; he was not violent, he was not cruel; she simply believed that he hated her. That was all she accused him of…. He was not changed; he had not disguised himself, during the year of his courtship, any more than she. But she had only seen half his nature then, as one saw the disk of the moon when it was partly masked by the shadow of the earth. She saw the full moon now — she saw the whole man.”
After her marriage, Isabel was still not forgotten by a few of her past loves. One was a Bostonian, Caspar Goodwood, who travelled to Rome to call on her and assess for himself her nuptial situation. “To-night what he was chiefly thinking of was that he was to leave her to-morrow, and that he had gained nothing by coming but the knowledge that he was as superfluous as ever. About herself he had gained no knowledge; she was imperturbable, impenetrable. He felt the old bitterness, which he had tried so hard to swallow, rise again in his throat, and he knew that there are disappointments which last as long as life.” Adding to the insult, her husband, Mr. Osmond, had befriended him on his many social calls to their palatial residence and once tried to give marital advice. Whether genuine or not, it was hard to judge, “Ah, you see, being married is in itself an occupation. It isn’t always active; it’s often passive; but that takes even more attention. Then my wife and I do so many things together…. If you are ever bored, get married. Your wife indeed may bore you, in that case; but you will never bore yourself. You will always have something to say to yourself — always have a subject of reflection.”
Gilbert Osmond could be profound, even when not sincere. In speaking to Isabel, he offered, “You smile most expressively when I talk about us; but I assure you that we, we, is all that I know. I take our marriage seriously; you appear to have found a way of not doing so. I am not aware that we are divorced or separated; for me we are indissolubly united. You are nearer to me than any human creature, and I am nearer to you. It may be a disagreeable proximity; it’s one, at any rate, of our own deliberate making. You don’t like to be reminded of that, I know.”
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